Spore has been hacked, cracked and dumped on Bittorrent for world to have for free

Share

It was inevitable. The only question was “How long will it would take?” Before release? Hours after? In the case of Spore, the hot new life/universe/everything simulator from The Sims creator Will Wright, the answer to that question is “24 hours before it hits the shops.”

Despite featuring the same game-crippling digital rights management that had PC gamers “hating on” Bioshock all over the internet, the EA game has been busted – with hacking team* RELOADED taking credit for busting open Spore’s SecuROM protection.

At least a few people must’ve got their pre-orders in to buy it legally first, although 27,000 SHAMELESS CRIMINALS are currently stealing it off Mininova right now. The official version of Spore, that comes on a disc in a box, remember, kids, is out tomorrow for PC and that computer Apple makes.

14 comments

I was interested in a bulk buy for a school, but cannot handle restrictions on reimaging for maintenance purposes. Do you think I could pursuade EA to authorise installation of the pirate copy, providing I buy and destroy the right number of authentic copies?

Downloading a game/film/mp3 online is NOT stealing, no matter what the industries try to tell you. It’s called copyright infringement, to steal you have to actually take a physical item a download is not a physical item.

I say download any games that use any sort of restrictive DRM type copy protection. Having lost 2 DVDRW drives to starforce protected games, I would feel totally justified if I decided to download £120 worth of software… Which is what it cost to buy both of the borked ones and their replacement… Snotty letters sent to the publishers of Race Driver 2 or 3, can’t remember and Silent Hunter 3.. and SF rootkit removed and the games cracked to get around the activation thing again.

All these copy protections do is punish the legitimate buyer. The people who download them will still download them, they will never buy the game anyway… so it’s NOT a lost sale as they try to claim… These industries are continuing to shoot themselves in the foot, as legitimate gamers and customers are literally being forced to consider downloading for free to avoid the severe punishment EA wants to inflict on anyone who regularly upgrades or reinstalls their operating system. I hear that the new Red Alert 3 game will have the same securom protection with up to 5 activations before locking you out and calling you a criminal… Boycott the companies that make these games with this sort of copy protection until they realise that punishing their customers for the actions of people who are NOT customers is a futile and self destroying process… If piracy is on the rise, it’s because the publishers are making it happen… It’s a self fulfilling prophecy… well done EA. 🙂

I am of the personal believe that no anti piracy policy should be enforced via the code itself, is useless and in the future when that software is no longer supported by the creator u will not even be able to run it. The companies are just wasting their money with these “technologies” and giving hacker a hell of a good time. make games available online. terminate this silly CD on drive or any other dumb anti piracy system. look at WoW, u can actually play with a pirated copy if you have a legal account, witch means you can play from any place in the world, result: WoW is number 1 MOG.

Spore’s DRM limits you to 3 non-revokable activations. So, if you buy a disc secondhand, and its activations have been used, the disk is nothing but a glorified placemat.

Which is, of course, one of EA’s true motivations for using SecuROM: trying to destroy the secondhand market, and changing the pc gaming market to software as a service (rental) rather than software as a product.

DRM has nothing to do with preventing piracy, despite EA’s public justifications.

Don’t believe me? Look at how well it works in stopping piracy. Bioshock? Mass Effect? Spore? All cracked.

How about stopping ‘casual’ piracy? (friend loans a disk to a friend). Well, you can install and play on at least 2 friends computers, as well as your own and you can all be playing at the same time. You can’t do that with the old style disk-in-drive DRM without cracking it.

So, it doesn’t work to stop ‘serious’ pirates, and it explictly permits at least 2 episodes of causal pirating per legal copy sold.

Of course, no one can ever reinstall windows, or add a hard drive, or a new video card to their PC without needing another activation. So there’s that downside.

But if you run out of activations, and are willing to spend 20 minutes on the $2.99/min EA support line, they might, at their own discretion, if you provide copies of receipts etc, provide you with another activation.

Or you could buy the game new again like their DRM-limit reached message said to do in Mass Effect.

That’s funny, I was just having a chat to Duncan about that one. He’s just picked up his bag and gone off to the Isle of Wight but I know that his plan is to go for the free one and then buy a boxed copy too.

His motives are to make sure he’s got a version of the game without all the publisher’s nonsense on it but I quite like the idea of downloading it and then buying a copy if I like the game. Somehow, though, I have a funny feeling I might be too busy playing the game to get my arse down the shops for the good deed.

I, for one, will be paying for this game. It’s given that it would have been available online in any case, but I have always wanted to support Maxis and Will Wright’s newest work of genius rather than resort to theft.